Secrets and Seashells at Rainbow Bay

by Ali McNamara

  ‘I will.’

  We leave Benji in the library opening up the first page of the diary. I thank Tiffany for her help, and then tell her to take the rest of the afternoon off so she doesn’t need to bump into Arthur again today.

  ‘But how will I be able to face him in the office tomorrow?’ she asks anxiously. ‘He’ll still be cross with me.’

  ‘I’ll speak to Arthur before you see him again,’ I tell her. ‘Don’t worry; I’ll smooth things over for you.’

  Tiffany heads back towards her room, while Tom and I stand awkwardly in the hall together.

  ‘What are you going to do with this?’ he asks, holding up the small pouch containing the brooch.

  ‘I have no idea,’ I say, taking it from him. ‘I guess I’ll just hold on to it for now, until I find out what’s what.’

  ‘Look after it; I reckon it might be pretty valuable.’

  ‘Yes, I know . . . ’ I look down at the velvet pouch.

  ‘Fancy a walk?’ Tom asks brightly. ‘After being stuck down in the cellar all that time, I could do with some fresh air.’

  I look at my watch. ‘Sure, I have time before I pick up Charlie.’

  ‘Beach?’ Tom suggests.

  ‘Definitely. I’d take Chester but he’s with Joey today. Although if Arthur is back then I guess Joey is too.’

  ‘How about it’s just us?’ Tom asks quietly.

  I nod. ‘Yes, you’re right. That would be nice.’

  Tom and I find suitable shoes, and then we head through the grounds of the castle, and along the secret path that leads down to the beach.

  ‘Ah,’ I say, breathing in the fresh sea air, ‘this feels good.’

  ‘Doesn’t it?’ Tom agrees, taking hold of my hand. ‘Let’s walk.’

  We stroll along the sand, quietly at first, each of us caught up in our own thoughts about what had happened down in the cellar.

  At least that’s what I’m thinking about, and I assume Tom is too.

  ‘You’ve been quiet lately,’ Tom says after a bit. ‘I wondered why?’

  ‘I’ve just got stuff on my mind, that’s all.’

  ‘What sort of stuff?’

  I hesitate; I don’t want more people worrying about my money troubles than is absolutely necessary.

  ‘Financial bits and pieces,’ I answer carefully.

  ‘Oh, I thought it might be something I’d done.’

  I have to smile. That was what Benji had thought, too. What is it with men? Straight or gay, they always think everything is about them. ‘No, it’s nothing you’ve done,’ I reassure him.

  ‘What’s funny?’ Tom asks.

  ‘Benji said almost the same thing to me.’

  Tom smiles now too. ‘I guess we both care about you and want you to be happy.’

  ‘Thank you, I appreciate both your concerns, really I do, but I’ll be fine.’

  ‘You’re not great at asking for help, are you?’ Tom says, stopping to look at me.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, you’ve got people who want to help you make a go of this castle, but you’re very reluctant to let them.’

  ‘I am not.’

  ‘Yes, you are. I understand why you find it difficult, Amelia, you’re used to going it alone. But you really don’t have to.’

  I shake my head. ‘No, you’re wrong. I do let people help me. You and Tiffany helped me find the diary today, didn’t you?’

  ‘Only because you couldn’t do it on your own.’

  ‘What about the stables, then?’ I say defiantly. ‘I’m not the only one doing that. When it’s open both Dorothy and Tiffany are going to be involved and have been in all the planning stages.’

  ‘Because it suited you to have them involved. You knew it made good business sense to let them have a role.’

  I look at Tom. ‘What is it you want me to do, then? Hold a committee meeting regarding all my decisions both personal and professional, open my life up to all and sundry?’

  ‘No, not to all and sundry. Only to those that are close to you – like me.’

  Before I can protest further, Tom pulls me to him, and without even waiting for any sort of approval from me, or any reason for it not to happen this time, he leans down and kisses me firmly on the lips.

  For the first few seconds of his kiss, I can feel myself resisting, but then I relax and allow myself to enjoy it.

  My arms, which had been firmly by my sides, involuntarily reach up and wrap themselves around him, and as our kiss progresses, I realise my fingers are gently caressing the back of his neck.

  As we pause for a moment to catch our breath, our faces pull away from each other, but our bodies remain firmly pressed together.

  ‘God, I’ve been wanting to do that for ages,’ Tom says breathlessly, kissing my forehead now.

  ‘Really?’ is all I can reply.

  ‘Of course really.’ Tom looks at me with surprise. ‘You are a very attractive woman, Amelia; you must know that.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘What?’ He holds me back in his arms. ‘You’re kidding, right?’

  I shake my head, and then to my embarrassment I feel a tear beginning to roll down my cheek. It’s quickly followed by another one, and then a third, until suddenly my cheeks are wet and my eyesight blurred.

  ‘Oh my, what have I said?’ Tom asks, letting go of me to fumble about in his pocket for a tissue. ‘Jeez, I’m useless, I don’t even have a hankie to offer you.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I say, unceremoniously wiping my cheeks with the sleeve of my top. ‘It’s not your fault – really.’

  I blink a few times to try to stop the tears from flowing, and then I dab again at my eyes with my sleeves.

  ‘Good job I haven’t got any mascara on today,’ I sniff, ‘or you’d be trying to retract your last statement pretty hastily by now.’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t. I’d still think you were beautiful.’

  ‘You really have to stop saying nice things!’ I hold up my hand in front of his face. ‘Or there will be a tear tsunami.’

  ‘Come on,’ Tom says, leading me across to some rocks. ‘Let’s sit down for a bit so you can recover from my amazing ability to make you cry. Then you can tell me why what I said caused you so many tears. I’ve a feeling it might be to do with that story you promised to tell me the night we walked back from the pub.’

  ‘What story?’ I ask innocently, even though I know exactly what he means.

  ‘The secret of why you’re just like one of these before it gets washed up on to the beach,’ he says, lifting a large conical shell up from the sand and passing it to me. ‘Soft on the inside, but covered with a hard protective shell.’

  Thirty-five

  There aren’t many people about on the beach this afternoon, just a couple walking a dog and a runner doing some sort of sprint training up and down the hard sand near the water’s edge. So as we sit on the smooth side of some rocks, we’re pretty isolated and alone.

  ‘Right,’ Tom asks gently. ‘What happened that made you have such a low opinion of yourself? I know the basics, but I have a feeling there’s more to this.’

  I take a deep breath. It was always hard going back down this particular road to the past, but I know that if I’m going to move forward with Tom, I have to talk about it.

  ‘You know that my husband walked out on me?’ I ask, trying to judge how much Benji has told him.

  ‘I knew you split up with your husband, but not that he walked out on you.’

  Right, so Benji had been fairly discreet then.

  ‘Yes, he just upped and left one day – no warning, nothing. I thought we were getting on fine. Obviously we had our moments, like all marriages do, but I just thought that was normal.’

  ‘He just left you and Charlie without telling you why?’

  ‘Uh-huh. When he’d been gone over twenty-four hours I was on the brink of reporting him missing to the police. Graham always warned me if he was going to be late, or anythi
ng was unusual. It was completely out of character for him just not to come home.’

  Tom nods. ‘So what happened then?’

  ‘I was about to sit down and ring the police, when I found a note. It was under the table; it must have blown off on to the floor after he left so I didn’t see it.’

  ‘What did it say?’ Tom prompts gently.

  ‘It said . . . ’ I take a deep breath. I don’t need time to remember because I’d never forgotten. It was just difficult to voice. It always had been. ‘It said he was living a lie and that he couldn’t do it any more. He said he still loved me and Charlie, but that he needed to get away for a while to get his head together.’

  ‘Did your husband have a high-powered job or something?’ Tom asks. ‘Was he stressed out by work?’

  ‘Hardly. Graham worked in a bank – not as manager or anything. Just as a cashier. His job had actually helped us out when we wanted to get a house – our mortgage was that little bit easier to come by. In retrospect, we probably shouldn’t have tried to take on such a big house. But we were getting married, we wanted a family. This was supposed to be our forever home.’

  My voice breaks a little, and Tom puts his hand on my knee.

  ‘And we were happy. Well, I thought we were. We had our dream wedding, then I fell pregnant with Charlie within a month of us trying – it was all so perfect. From the outside it seemed like we had everything; from the inside too, actually. But apparently he didn’t see it that way.’

  ‘So what was his problem – this Graham?’ Tom asks harshly, with obvious disdain. ‘It seems to me like he had everything a man could want. A beautiful wife, a gorgeous son, and a family home to return to every night. What could possibly have gone wrong?’

  ‘I never really found out. I was left with a young son and no money – oh, yes, he took all that too. He probably figured I had enough with the house, but what he didn’t think about was how I was going to pay the mortgage. I didn’t work then, I just looked after Charlie. You can imagine how quickly my perfect life fell apart, how fast the mortgage company repossessed our home when I couldn’t meet the repayments. How quickly we found ourselves without anywhere to live.’

  ‘But couldn’t you have stayed with friends or family until you got back on your feet?’

  ‘You’d be surprised how quickly so-called friends vanish when things aren’t going well for you. My problem was our friends were mainly his friends, so when he disappeared they all went very quiet.’

  ‘Did they know where he’d gone?’ Tom asks, again sounding annoyed.

  ‘I don’t think most of them did, maybe one or two. But they’d been well primed not to say anything to me.’

  ‘What about your family, then? Couldn’t they help?’

  ‘My dad died when I was eighteen, and my mum a few months before Graham left.’

  ‘He left you just after your mum died?’ Tom asks in a voice so low it’s barely audible. ‘Can this . . . I’ll call him a fool to be polite, this fool stoop any lower?’

  I shrug.

  ‘What about any brothers or sisters – couldn’t you go to them?’

  I shake my head. ‘Only child, me, like Charlie. That’s one of the reasons I didn’t want him to be. Anyway, the council kicked in eventually, and we had a few different homes before we ended up on the estate that Benji found us on. By that time I had a job and we were just about surviving on the money from that and the few benefits I was entitled to. The next part of my sorry tale is Fairy Godmother Benji turning up on my doorstep one day, telling me I now owned a castle, and then magically persuading me to come here. Tiffany said my story is a bit like a fairy tale, and I’m inclined to agree with her now after hearing myself tell it.’

  ‘It is some tale,’ Tom says, smiling sympathetically at me. ‘From council estate to lady of the manor.’

  ‘I guess. So after hearing it, can you understand why I’m a little bit wary of putting my trust in people? Why I protect myself within my “shell”?’

  Tom nods. ‘I can. But what I still can’t get over is why your husband just left like that. And you never heard anything more from him?’

  ‘Nope, not until about a year later when one of my ex so-called friends spotted him. I think she felt bad about abandoning me the way she had, so she got in touch again to tell me she’d seen him – over Facebook, of all things. As you can imagine I hadn’t really been in the mood for updating my profile, or looking at what perfect lives others were pretending to lead, so it was a shock to get an email telling me someone had sent me a message. It was Andrea, saying she’d seen Graham in Doncaster out and about with his new partner.’

  ‘He had a new partner!’ Tom asks, his eyes wide.

  ‘Yep, and not only that, his new partner was a man.’

  Tom’s mouth drops open. ‘You’re kidding me. No, I’m sorry, obviously you’re not. So he’s gay – or does that make him bi?’

  ‘I wondered that too, but apparently after speaking to Andrea and doing a bit of digging myself, it turns out my ex-husband now prefers men.’

  Tom shakes his head; I can only assume it’s in disbelief at my sorry tale. ‘So that was the lie he was living – being gay in a straight marriage?’

  I shrug. ‘I can only suppose so. Now do you understand why I don’t tell many people about this?’ I say, my own head dropping down to look at the shell still held firmly in my hand. As tightly as I’ve been gripping on to it, it still remains intact. No one is going to break its protective layer, a bit like no one has ever broken the one I’d put around myself and Charlie when Graham left.

  ‘Hey, don’t you dare think any of this is your fault,’ Tom says, tilting my head back up to face him again. ‘This isn’t anyone’s fault, let alone yours.’

  ‘I know. But I can’t help wondering if I’d done something differently . . . ’

  ‘No,’ Tom commands, his hand dropping away. He looks out across the sand towards the sea. ‘I can never condone what your ex-husband did to you and Charlie – the way he just left like that was unforgivable. But no one can, or should, ever change their sexuality to suit another person.’

  ‘You sound like you know what you’re talking about.’

  Tom looks down at his feet. ‘I guess it’s my turn to come clean,’ he says, kicking at the sand.

  ‘Oh my God, please don’t tell me you’re gay,’ I say, only half-jokingly. ‘First my husband, then Benji, not you as well. It must be me!’

  Tom laughs. ‘No, I’m not gay. Couldn’t you tell by that kiss a few moments ago?’

  ‘Ah yes . . . ’ I agree as I remember Tom’s passionate embrace. ‘Very good point. You’re doing a pretty good job of masking it if you are.’

  ‘No, it’s not me that’s gay. It’s my brother – Joe.’

  ‘Joe, yes, I’d forgotten about him; the one I thought was Benji’s girlfriend!’

  ‘The very same. Joe was in a similar predicament to your husband. He wasn’t married or anything, but he was hiding his sexuality. Mainly from our father who disapproved of anything that wasn’t “normal”, as he put it. He thought we should each settle down with a suitable girl as soon as possible once we turned twenty, have 2.4 children, and a four-bedroomed house in Surrey. Preferably continuing in the family business too. But sadly for him it didn’t work out that way for either of us.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Both Joe and I were doing exactly what Dad wanted to begin with. He’d trained us in the family firm – furniture restoration, as you know. But neither of us had settled down or wanted to. Joe because he was secretly gay, and me because,’ Tom looks slightly ashamed, ‘well, I was too busy playing the field.’

  ‘At least you’re honest about it.’

  Tom shrugs. ‘I was young; I didn’t know any better. Anyway, I was always keen for Joe to come out to Mum and Dad, but he was scared; he couldn’t bear the thought of them disapproving of him. To cut a very long story short, when no prospective fiancées seemed to be appearing in Joe’s
life, my parents stepped in and tried to set him up with a few girls. Joe went along with it, but obviously nothing ever came of it. Then when they tried it with the sister of a girl I’d been dating, I had to step in.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I told my girlfriend the truth and of course she told her sister. Her sister wasn’t the most discreet of people so word soon got out about Joe, and eventually it got back to my parents. They went ballistic.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘My father was furious – mainly about Joe’s sexuality – but my mother was just upset that neither of us had confided in her. I felt really sorry for her, actually; I always told Joe that Mum would be okay about it.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘There were a lot of arguments at home, before the big one. My stupid, narrow-minded father gave Joe an ultimatum.’ Tom stops and shakes his head in disbelief. ‘Even now I can’t quite believe he said this; he told him either he stopped being gay or he moved out of the house, and the family would have nothing more to do with him.’

  ‘He didn’t? That’s awful.’

  ‘I know. You can imagine what Joe said. He packed his bags and left that night. I can still hear my mother sobbing all night in her bedroom. The next day Dad turned on me. He asked me why I’d never said anything, told me I should have been loyal to the family name, and the most ludicrous – I should have helped Joe to try harder at being straight.’

  ‘What? That’s madness.’

  ‘Tell me about it. So the next day I left too. I wanted to stay for my mother’s sake, but I couldn’t live in a house where that sort of bigotry was present. So I packed my things and left, and I’ve never been back.’

  ‘Do you have any contact with your family at all?’

  ‘Joe and I do, obviously. Mum only through birthday and Christmas cards now. But I bet Dad doesn’t know she’s sending or receiving them. I haven’t spoken to my father since the day I walked out.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Tom.’ This time it’s my turn to comfort him. ‘Aren’t humans rotten sometimes?’

  Tom nods. ‘Not all humans, though,’ he says, and he reaches out his hand to cup my face. ‘Sometimes you stumble across some pretty magnificent ones in the strangest of places . . . ’